WASHINGTON: From a gold-plated White House to a grandiose revamp for the capital, Washington, Donald Trump is trying to leave an architectural mark like no American president has attempted for decades.

“I’m good at building things,” the former property magnate said earlier this month as he announced perhaps the biggest project of all, a huge new $200-million ballroom at the US executive mansion.

Trump made his fortune developing glitzy hotels and casinos branded with his name. Critics say the makeover Trump has given the White House in his second presidency is of a similar style.

Parts of it now resemble his brash Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, particularly the newly paved-over Rose Garden with its picnic tables and yellow and white umbrellas.

During Trump’s first term, the British style writer Peter York dubbed his style ‘dictator chic,’ comparing it to that of foreign autocrats.

But Trump has also recently unveiled a grand vision for the entire US capital.

And he has explicitly tied his desire to ‘beautify’ Washington to his recent crackdown on crime, which has seen him deploy troops in the Democratic-run city, where just two months ago he held a military parade on his birthday.

“This is a ratcheting up of the performance of power,” Peter Loge, director of George Washington University’s School of Media, told AFP.

“That’s what he does. Puts his name on bibles and casinos, so the logic makes complete sense. Except now he’s playing with lives, the reputation of the United States and a democratic legacy.”

Oval bling

Trump is far from the first president to carry out major renovations at the White House in its 225-year history.

Franklin Roosevelt oversaw the construction of the current Oval Office in 1934, Harry Truman led a major overhaul that ended in 1951, and John F Kennedy created the modern Rose Garden in 1961.

The White House Historical Association put Trump’s changes in context, saying the building was a “living symbol of American democracy, evolving while enduring as a national landmark.”

Its president, Stewart McLaurin, said in an essay in June that renovations throughout history had drawn criticism from the media and Congress over “costs, historical integrity and timing.”

“Yet many of these alterations have become integral to the identity of the White House, and it is difficult for us to imagine the White House today without these evolutions and additions,” he wrote.

Trump’s changes are nevertheless the furthest-reaching for nearly a century.

Soon after his return, he began blinging up the Oval Office walls with gold trim and trinkets that visiting foreign leaders have been careful to praise.

Then he ordered the famed grass of the Rose Garden to be turned into a patio. Trump said he did so because women’s high-heeled shoes were sinking into the turf.

After it was finished, Trump installed a sound system, and AFP reporters could regularly hear music from his personal playlist blaring from the patio.

Trump has also installed two huge US flags on the White House lawns, and a giant mirror on the West Wing colonnade in which the former reality TV star can see himself as he leaves the Oval.

‘Big beautiful face’

Billionaire Trump says he is personally funding those improvements. But his bigger plans will need outside help.

The White House said the new ballroom planned for the East Wing by the end of his term in January 2029 will be funded by Trump and other patriot donors.”

Trump, meanwhile, says he expects Congress to agree to foot the $2 billion bill for his grand plan to spruce up Washington.

On a trip to oil-rich Saudi Arabia in May, Trump admired the “gleaming marvels” of the skyline — and he appears intent on creating his own gleaming capital.

That ranges from a marble-plated makeover at the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts to getting rid of graffiti and — ever the construction boss — fixing broken road barriers and laying new asphalt.

But Trump’s Washington plans also involve a crackdown by the National Guard that he has threatened to extend to other cities like Chicago.

He has repeatedly said of the troop presence that Americans would “maybe like a dictator” — even as he rejects his opponents’ claims that he’s acting like one.

Trump’s own face even looms above Washington streets from huge posters on the Labour and Agriculture departments.

“Mr President, I invite you to see your big beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labour,” Secretary of Labour Lori Chavez-DeRemer said Tuesday at a cabinet meeting.

TEHRAN: Iran has played down the return of UN nuclear inspectors, saying it does not mean full cooperation has resumed. 

Officials hinted instead at a “new form” of working with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), weeks after ties were frozen in the wake of deadly Israeli and US strikes at the nuclear sites in the country in June earlier this year.

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency began work at the key nuclear site of Bushehr in southwestern Iran, the nuclear watchdog’s chief, Rafael Grossi, said, the first team to enter the country since Tehran formally suspended cooperation with the UN agency last month.

“No final text has yet been approved on the new cooperation framework with the IAEA, and views are being exchanged,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said, quoted by state television.

The agency’s inspectors left Iran after Israel launched its unprecedented attack on June 13, striking nuclear and military facilities as well as residential areas and killing more than 1,000 people.

Washington later joined in with strikes on nuclear facilities at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz.

Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks that killed dozens in Israel. A ceasefire between Iran and Israel has been in place since June 24.

Iran subsequently suspended its cooperation with the IAEA, citing the agency’s failure to condemn the Israeli and US attacks.

But on Wednesday, Grossi said the inspectors were “there now”, adding: “Today they are inspecting Bushehr.”

Under the law suspending cooperation, inspectors may access Iranian nuclear sites only with the approval of the country’s top security body, the Supreme National Security Council.

Tehran has said repeatedly that future cooperation with the agency will take “a new form”.

The spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Behrouz Kamalvandi, said the IAEA inspectors would oversee the replacement of fuel at the Bushehr nuclear power plant.

He made no mention of whether inspectors would be allowed access to other sites, including Fordo and Natanz, which were hit during the war.

‘Litmus test’

Grossi, on a visit to Washington, said discussions about inspecting other sites were underway with no immediate agreement.

“We are continuing the conversation so that we can go to all places, including the facilities that have been impacted,” he said.

He said that Iran cannot restrict inspectors only to “non-attacked facilities.”

“There is no such thing as a la carte inspection work.”

The return of inspectors came after Iranian diplomats held talks with counterparts from Britain, France and Germany in Geneva on Tuesday.

Their second round of talks since the Israeli attacks included discussion of European threats to trigger the reimposition of UN sanctions against Iran before they are permanently lifted in mid-October.

The window for triggering the so-called “snapback mechanism” of a moribund 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major powers closes on October 18.

During their previous meeting with Iran in July, the three European powers suggested extending the snapback deadline if Tehran resumed negotiations with the US and cooperation with the IAEA, the Financial Times reported.

Iran later dismissed the Europeans’ right to extend the deadline, and said it was working with its allies, China and Russi, to prevent the reimposition of sanctions.

Iran’s deputy foreign minister Karim Gharibabadi on Wednesday said that if the snapback is triggered, “the path of interaction that we have now opened with the International Atomic Energy Agency will also be completely affected and will probably stop.”

On Tuesday, Russia circulated a draft UN Security Council resolution aimed at pushing back the deadline for triggering snapback sanctions by six months, according to the text seen by AFP.

The Russian proposal does not set preconditions for the deadline extension.

Russia’s deputy UN ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, said that the updated proposal was designed to “give more breathing space for diplomacy”, adding that he hoped it “will be acceptable”.

“It will be kind of a litmus test for those who really want to uphold diplomatic efforts, and for those who don’t want any diplomatic solution, but just want to pursue their own nationalist, selfish agendas against Iran,” he told the media.

At least 25 people were killed and 27 injured when a bus overturned in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, authorities told AFP, a week after the country’s deadliest road accident in years.

The crash happened “due to the driver’s negligence” on a highway near the capital Kabul leading to the southern city of Kandahar, interior ministry spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani said.

Qani said 25 people were killed and 27 were being treated at hospitals for injuries, the extent of which was not specified.

Deadly traffic crashes are common in Afghanistan, due in part to poor roads after decades of conflict, dangerous driving on highways and a lack of regulation.

Last Tuesday, 78 people, including more than a dozen children, were killed in western Herat province when a bus carrying migrants returning from Iran collided with a motorcycle and a truck, according to authorities.

In December last year, two bus accidents involving a fuel tanker and a truck on a highway through central Afghanistan killed at least 52.